i don’t have that many good memories, to be honest. What I do have involves a lot of regret. But then recently there came some different kinds of emotions, of feelings. Sometimes all of the things that I had tried to distill out the experiences that I’ve had in the past year or so, love isn’t often the healthy kind, the kind that you can bundle up and sell off with roses. Sometimes it has thorns, and it doesn’t look too bright. And that love doesn’t need to be fair, and sometimes the best love doesn’t feel fair at all, and isn’t supposed to feel fair. But this lack of fairness makes it seem like that that love should not exist at all, or that it should be terminated. But what would happen if we terminated all the love that wasn’t fair, or if it had offended us in some way? What of the people that we loved, what of the position that we put ourselves in — is it not okay to put ourselves in an inferior position, of a position of less power? And if this was a daily practice, done unto ordinary people, then what about the loved ones and those who are special to us? Do we just give up when there is a power differential? Where would the human race and progress be if we did that?
On my trip home I realised how much there was a power differential between me and my parents, and how there would always exist a giant gaping chasm between us, one that can never be fulfilled or abridged. It was either that I rise to meet them, or for there to be no relationship at all, and I feel like I choose for there to be a relationship, even if all the circumstances don’t seem to warrant it and that there really shouldn’t be one at all, because of all that has happened- the immigrant’s journey of never understanding each other, perhaps the most obvious othering there is out there and which there can be. I would be amiss if I didn’t realise that I would be lying whichever way I told the truth about my parents and my upbringing, and this lying, which has been done through the ages, has caused great harm and trauma to myself, and for the longest period I had chosen to run away from it, because the only way and solution I had was to leave, because it was too painful. But sometimes the thing that we hate the most, and that we want to smack down the most, because it bothers us the most, is actually the thing that saves us, in the end. Seeing my parents, feeling like they had undone so many parts of me as an adult and as I was growing up, and because of the cultural differences we had, I had felt so many borders that shouldn’t have been crossed but were crossed, a land within me conquered and chequered by what I had later on thought of as unreasonable forces and armies, that I had been irrevocably harmed in the process and damaged beyond recognition of what my true self could have been. For so many years I had completely refused to participate in what I thought of as “their culture”, a dirty, unkempt and unhappy culture, I thought there was nothing worse than being Chinese. All of the other indicators also told me so. And so the darkness inside me screamed out, enough. Too much. Don’t want anymore. Let’s go.
But there is something to be said about the coming together of these disparate identities and thoughts, the act between the selfish and the selfless, a balancing act of somewhere in the middle. Not too much one way and not too much the other way, but trying to find that lean in the middle.